On 17 September 2026, Dr. Dennis P. Petri, International Director of the IIRF, gave a webinar for Universidad De La Salle on religious freedom in Latin America, with a focus on Colombia. The recording is available on YouTube.
The presentation opened with a question that runs through all of the IIRF’s work: what do we fail to see when we look at religious freedom through a narrow lens? National indices tend to report Latin American countries as relatively free. The Violent Incidents Database (VID), which records events rather than expert scores, tells a different story. In 2025 the VID documented 564 violent incidents in the region, led by Cuba (220), Mexico (84), Nicaragua (64) and Colombia (49), and 59 killings of religious actors.
Dr. Petri drew on the forthcoming IIRF report on Latin America and the Caribbean, part of the Global Religious Freedom Index, to show that the region’s sharpest trend since 1990 is not state repression but societal discrimination against religious minorities, which has risen by 71 percent. Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela remain the countries where the state is the main perpetrator. In Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Haiti the state is comparatively neutral while organized crime, indigenous traditional authorities and ideologically driven movements target religious communities.
The Colombian case illustrated why national averages mislead. Between 2017 and 2024 the VID recorded 414 incidents by non-state actors in Colombia against 13 by state actors, concentrated in Valle del Cauca, Cauca, Antioquia, Norte de Santander and Chocó. Colombia now shows the highest and fastest-growing territorial concentration of religious violence in the region.
Against this background, Dr. Petri examined Colombia’s relationship with religion: the 1994 statutory law, the 2018 public policy on religious freedom, which the IIRF has evaluated in a forthcoming article in Religions, and the recent litigation over presidential religious symbolism, from the 2020 controversy over President Duque’s tweet on the Virgin of Chiquinquirá to the court order following the August 2026 inauguration of President De la Espriella. His argument was that the debate over state neutrality is real, but that it should not eclipse the question of who is actually vulnerable, and where.
The webinar is a useful introduction for anyone working on religious freedom monitoring, public policy or Latin American politics.